WHY I TEACH Black teachers​in their own words

“We want our children educated. The school system in the country districts of the South is a disgrace and in few towns and cities are Negro schools what they ought to be. We want the national government to step in and wipe out illiteracy in the South. Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.​"And when we call for education we mean real education. We believe in work. We ourselves are workers, but work is not necessarily education. Education is the development of power and ideal. We want our children trained as intelligent human beings should be, and we will fight for all time against any proposal to educate black boys and girls simply as servants and underlings, or simply for the use of other people. They have a right to know, to think, to aspire.”

Happy birthday, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. We are celebrating your legacy today and thinking on the ways that Black teachers can bring excellence to their students.

And we want to send out appreciation to the San Francisco Unified School District for being a partner in the work with our San Francisco Inquiry Group. This has been a pilot year for the Inquiry Group and we can't wait to present our findings in May 2017.